An Orthodox Synagogue Perseveres in the South Bronx

By DAVID GONZALEZ

Published: October 16, 1990

Each Saturday in the Longwood section of the South Bronx, a handful of elderly Jews slowly converges on the Intervale Jewish Center, uncertain whether enough men will gather to worship at the temple to provide a minyan, the quorum of 10 men needed to perform a full service. If not, Moishe Sacks, who serves as the temple's rabbi, will settle for nine and throw open the doors to the wooden ark, where the Torah is stored, and declare that God is their 10th man.

''The ritual says there have to be 10 men, and I don't doubt at all there have to be 10,'' said Mr. Sacks with a sly smile and a shrug. ''The idea is how you count those 10.''

Clinging to Traditions

Such creativity has served him well as the rabbi of the South Bronx's only surviving Orthodox Jewish shul, or synagogue. The building's facade looks like a throwback to the decimated temples of postwar Europe, with its doors seeming to be shuttered and a phantom second story that was never completed for lack of funds.

But Mr. Sacks and his congregation tenaciously cling to their traditions in a neighborhood in which dozens of other temples have faded into memory and Spanish has long since replaced Yiddish as the language of daily life.

While his twists on Jewish law have drawn criticism from his stricter colleagues, Mr. Sacks said his interpretations maintained the spirit of the religious laws and enabled him to continue ministering to his congregation. ''It's like you want to cross the stream and you can use a boat, swim or go across the rocks,'' he said. ''If you can't swim, you use a boat, and if you're a good jumper, you go across the rocks. The important thing is to get to the goal.''

When the Intervale Jewish Center opened in 1922 for Russian immigrants from Minsk, the streets of the South Bronx and the East Bronx were filled with Jews who had traded their dreary existences in Lower East Side tenements for the roomy apartments that sprang up alongside the elevated trains that rumbled up Westchester Avenue. There were stores that catered to their dietary laws, Yiddish theaters that provided popular entertainment, and, above all, temples that met their spiritual needs.

But the 1950's saw the beginning of an exodus from the area to New York City's growing suburbs as Puerto Ricans and blacks moved into the neighborhood, only to find themselves trapped in a shrinking manufacturing economy where jobs were scarce. The neighborhood began its inexorable descent into the depths of urban blight, leaving behind mostly those older Jews either too poor or too set in their ways to move.

To those who remained, the Intervale Jewish Center was the focal point of their lives. ''The synagogue is my heart,'' said Malachi Parkus, 76, who was born in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. ''Without the synagogue I see no reason to live for.''

Faded and Tattered

Where 500 people once fit into the temple, seven worshipers sat last Saturday on creaky benches that were splattered with paint and sometimes served as makeshift shelves for prayer books. Four men went up to the Torah and gently swayed as Mr. Sacks read in Hebrew from the book of Genesis.

Behind them, faded and tattered banners elaborately embroidered with Stars of David or the Ten Commandments flanked by lions and bearing the names of defunct congregations hung on railings in mute testament to the toll that time has taken on the area. The temple's dank, mildewy air has left curlicues of flaking paint clinging to walls mottled with yellow water stains.

Mr. Parkus stood nearby with his head swathed in a tan and black prayer shawl and one hand atop the unrolled scroll. ''I put my hand on the Torah so the words will go up and reach God,'' he explained later. ''That way, every time Mr. Sacks reads, God gets it.''

In the Orthodox tradition, the women sat apart from the men, but not behind the threadbare white curtain that once designated their section along the far left wall. In deference to their age and the temple's tiny congregation, they sat across the aisle from the men at tables, where they awaited their after-service meal of hallah, gefilte fish and dates.

Elsie Miroff, a 92-year-old retired dressmaker, chattered away with two friends, her hoarse, whispery speech a rapid-fire blend of Yiddish and English. Although she closed her nearby tailor shop three years ago to move into a nursing home in the northeast Bronx at her children's urging, she goes to the Intervale Jewish Center every Saturday and Sunday.

'It's My People Here'

''I love it,'' she said of the synagogue. ''It's my people here.'' At the end of the service, the men's voices rose in song as they prayed and approached the women. ''As long as my soul is within my body, the Lord is with me and I am not afraid,'' they intoned in Hebrew as the three women at the service rose to their feet and hummed along.

While Saturdays are devoted to worship, Sundays at the temple are a blend of school and socializing. Former and current neighborhood residents, as many as two or three dozen, come by for brunch and a chance to see friends and join a discussion of the week's Torah reading.

''If they want an oasis of Judaism, this is the place to come,'' said Louis Kaplan, 74, a retired clerical worker.

During the week, Mr. Sacks tends to the business of running the temple, paying bills, answering letters from old neighbors who write to see if the temple still exists, and thanking donors who have helped the temple keep it doors open. Occasionally, he engages in biblical discussions with Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses from down the street who come to him for accurate translations of biblical passages from the original Hebrew.

Mr. Sacks, a pudgy man with silver hair and dark bushy eyebrows who was born in Lithuania, has lived since 1936 in the neighborhood, where he worked in a nearby bakery unitl he retired five years ago.

He arrived at the Intervale temple in 1962 after the other local temples he had attended closed down, one by one. He was never been ordained, but his boundless energy, intellectual curiosity and ability to weave stories that give a lesson made him a natural for the rabbi's position when it was vacated in the mid-1960's.

The Driving Force

His congregation credits him as the synagogue's driving force, a view echoed by an anthropologist who chronicled the five years he spent studying the synagoue in ''The Miracle of Intervale Avenue'' (Schocken Books, 1986). ''Moishe gave me a sense of the creative response to the vicissitudes of life,'' said the writer, Jack Kugelmass, who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin. ''He weaves a narrative through which everybody there fulfills a role.''

Although Mr. Sacks's sons have urged him to move from the area because it has been plagued by serious crime and the synagogue has had burglaries in past years, Mr. Sacks remained steadfast in his commitment to the temple. He said he has welcomed to the synagogue the children of mixed-faith marriages who did not feel comfortable in stricter congregations and he has even offered a wedding blessing for a Jewish woman whose own congregation frowned on her marriage to a gentile.

''This shul has got a significance to each person that comes here, whether it is just a tie back to the past, a little soul-searching on the present situation or a little lamentation on how they got into the present situation,'' he said.

A Vote of Confidence

Staying open was a vote of confidence in a community that has begun to shed its image of postwar ruin for that of a neighborhood whose sloping streets have started to be lined with renovated apartment buildings and ranch-style houses with green lawns and white picket fences.

''The community itself wages a fight and when they see someone else waging a fight too, it's like gladiators fighting and looking next to them and appreciating one another,'' he said. ''In the end, we have common enemies -enemies against morality.''

The passage of time may have helped the community begin its slow return to stability, but for the temple's elderly congregation, time brings the threat of extinction. Yet on some days, local merchants or the occasional police officer will drop in, filling out the minyan and enabling the group to say the kaddish, or prayers for the dead, while at other times the congregants' grandchildren and great-grandchildren come by for services, giving Mr. Sacks a glimmer of hope that the temple could survive, even if it meant bending the rules at times.

''As long as there is life in you, you can worship God,'' he said. ''Life is the predominant factor.''

Photos: The Intervale Jewish Center is the South Bronx's only surviving Orthodox Jewish synagogue. Moishe Sacks, who serves as its rabbi, at head of the table, talked with congregation members who cling to their traditions in the mainly Hispanic neighborhood. (pg. B1); Louis Kaplan, left, and Harry Weissman, removing a plastic cover from a Torah at the Intervale Jewish Center in the South Bronx. ''If they want an oasis of Judaism, this is the place to come,'' said Mr. Kaplan, who has been attending services at the temple for the last 25 years. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times) (pg. B6)